Free The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman Page A

already know all about that .”
    She laughed, a high, tinkling laugh, which sounded
friendly and true and real, and had no flapping rags in it. Then she said,
“Little pitchers . . . ,” and a moment later the door opened the whole
way, and Ursula Monkton was looking straight at me. She had redone her makeup,
her pale lipstick and her big eyelashes.
    â€œGo to bed,” she said. “Now.”
    â€œI want to talk to my dad,” I said, without hope.
She said nothing, just smiled, with no warmth in it, and no love, and I went
back up the stairs, and climbed into my bed, and lay in the darkened bedroom
until I gave up on sleeping, and then sleep enveloped me when I was not
expecting it, and I slept without comfort.

VII.
    T he next
day was bad.
    My parents had both left the house before I
woke.
    It had turned cold, and the sky was a bleak and
charmless gray. I went through my parents’ bedroom to the balcony that ran along
the length of their bedroom and my-sister’s-and-mine, and I stood on the long
balcony and I prayed to the sky that Ursula Monkton would have tired of this
game, and that I would not see her again.
    Ursula Monkton was waiting for me at the bottom of
the stairs when I went down.
    â€œSame rules as yesterday, little pitcher,” she
said. “You can’t leave the property. If you try, I will lock you in your bedroom
for the rest of the day, and when your parents come home I will tell them you
did something disgusting.”
    â€œThey won’t believe you.”
    She smiled sweetly. “Are you sure? If I tell them
you pulled out your little willy and widdled all over the kitchen floor, and I
had to mop it up and disinfect it? I think they’ll believe me. I’ll be very
convincing.”
    I went out of the house and down to my laboratory.
I ate all the fruit that I had hidden there the day before. I read Sandie Sees
It Through, another of my mother’s books. Sandie was a plucky but poor
schoolgirl who was accidentally sent to a posh school, where everybody hated
her. In the end she exposed the Geography Teacher as an International Bolshevik,
who had tied the real Geography Teacher up. The climax was in the school
assembly, when Sandie bravely got up and made a speech which began, “I know I
should not have been sent here. It was only an error in paperwork that sent me
here and sent Sandy spelled with a Y to the town grammar school. But I thank
Providence that I came here. Because Miss Streebling is not who she claims to
be.”
    In the end Sandie was embraced by the people who
had hated her.
    My father came home early from work—earlier than I
remembered seeing him home in years.
    I wanted to talk to him, but he was never
alone.
    I watched them from the branch of my beech
tree.
    First he showed Ursula Monkton around the gardens,
proudly showing her the rosebushes and the blackcurrant bushes and the cherry
trees and the azaleas as if he had had anything to do with them, as if they had
not been put in place and tended by Mr. Wollery for fifty years before ever we
had bought the house.
    She laughed at all his jokes. I could not hear what
he was saying, but I could see the crooked smile he had when he knew he was
saying something funny.
    She was standing too close to him. Sometimes he
would rest his hand on her shoulder, in a friendly sort of way. It worried me
that he was standing so close to her. He didn’t know what she was. She was a
monster, and he just thought she was a normal person, and he was being nice to
her. She was wearing different clothes today: a gray skirt, of the kind they
called a midi, and a pink blouse.
    On any other day if I had seen my father walking
around the garden, I would have run over to him. But not that day. I was scared
that he would be angry, or that Ursula Monkton would say something to make him
angry with me.
    I became terrified of him when he was angry. His
face (angular and usually affable) would grow